Demons of the dust

I remember -- digging twenty years back -- reading a poem called "Demons of the Dust" by the Russian symbolist poet Valerii Briusov, who wasn't really a great poet. In fact, his idea of being rad and avant-garde was to crawl under a table for a photograph, as we see above. Small wonder that he is not celebrated in world culture as a must-read guy.

But anyway, this poem is all about dust and memory and imagination and whatnot, and the scene of the action is pulling books off of shelves. And, as I prepare to move nine years of crap accumulated in Princeton, on top of 10 years of accumulated junk from New York, back to North Carolina, this whole dust-imagination-memory nexus keeps cropping up. Mostly I have to try to ignore it to just get things done. The internet has changed the scope and shape of memory, after all, and I myself draw ever nigher to the dust as I dawdle. Time to pare shit down and move on, as if to show that You Can Go Home Again.